


Spat Back Out the Monster That You See

by destroythemeek



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Allison Argent Cameo, Backstory, Character Study, Coming of Age, F/M, Gen, Minor Character Death, Murder, Talia Hale Cameo, Victoria Argent Cameo, Warning: Kate Argent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-24
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2018-02-06 00:00:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1836946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destroythemeek/pseuds/destroythemeek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Her father reached into his pocket and pulled out a pendant on a long leather cord.  When he slipped it over her head, Kate picked it up off her chest to admire the intricate wolf design.  'You’re going to be a great leader one day,' her father said, beaming, 'and you will rid the world of this scourge.'</p><p>She couldn’t wait to start."</p><p>Kate Argent is the hero of her own story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spat Back Out the Monster That You See

**Author's Note:**

> This fic lines up with canon as much as possible, given the inconsistencies of the show's timeline. I've set Kate's birth in August of 1980, which doesn't match the headstone we see, but makes more sense for other canon events. There is a reference to the "Search for a Cure" webisodes, but you don't need to have seen them to make sense of it. Also, while I don't condone Kate's actions (and I hope the fic doesn't, either), please be warned for graphic depictions of murder and violence, a semi-graphic depiction of rape, and other somewhat graphic non-con elements. Kate Argent is a warning unto herself.
> 
> Many, many thanks to my beta, [likeadeuce](http://archiveofourown.org/users/likeadeuce/pseuds/likeadeuce), and my main fic cheerleader, [queenitsy](http://archiveofourown.org/users/queenitsy/pseuds/queenitsy), for encouraging this fic as it slowly grew over the past year. I promised I'd finish before the season 4 premiere, and I'm sneaking this in right under the wire!

_“In the end, everything collides / my childhood spat back out the monster that you see.” – Fall Out Boy, “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark”_

Kate Argent learned about werewolves five days after her fourth birthday. Her big brother had taken her to the movie theater as a present, paid for their fares on the city bus and bought her candy and popcorn, then let her sit in a big girl seat in the noisy dark to watch fantasies come alive on the screen. For the rest of the week, she ran around the house reenacting _The NeverEnding Story_ , clutching a tiny rubber snake as a talisman and declaring her intention to save all of Fantasia.

On the fifth day, her father came home from the grocery store and snatched the snake out of her hand. “You don’t need to play with this nonsense,” he said. “The power is already inside of you. And it’s about time you knew how special you are.”

“Dad…” Chris said, dropping his pen onto the summer homework for his eighth grade honors English class. “She’s too little for that.” Kate couldn’t understand why her brother sounded so upset. Her daddy had just called her special.

“Would you rather she find out when the monsters come to our door?” her father asked, taking her hand and leading her toward a door she’d never been allowed to open. “Come now, Katie. I have something important to show you.”

When Kate saw the creature caged in her family’s basement, she knew she was supposed to be afraid. “They’ll kill you if they get half a chance,” her father warned her. “It’s our job to stop them before they can.” But the snarling thing with blood-matted hair and inhuman features cowering behind electrified bars didn’t look like a nightmare to Kate. It looked like a fantasy come to life. Destiny had come to take her on an adventure, just like the stories had promised.

Her father reached into his pocket and pulled out a pendant on a long leather cord. When he slipped it over her head, Kate picked it up off her chest to admire the intricate wolf design. “You’re going to be a great leader one day,” her father said, beaming, “and you will rid the world of this scourge.” 

She couldn’t wait to start.

~*~

Kate liked to visit her father while he worked. He had a set of three reinforced cages that he kept in the basement, each one humming with electricity siphoned from the closest power lines, and he liked to keep a few wolves in them to study. He was always looking for more effective ways to hurt them, or new techniques to draw out pack secrets. Kate didn’t understand most of what was going on in those early years, but it was exciting just to watch her father fight monsters, a knight in silk and cotton armor.

Chris hated that Kate spent time in the basement with their father. When he was home and not at school or a friend’s house or practicing archery or soccer, he tried to lure Kate back up the stairs with promises of board games and tea parties and ice cream sundaes. But Kate never wanted to leave, and Chris never came down to force her. He just sighed a sad little sigh and climbed the stairs to his bedroom.

One day, while playing in a corner of the basement, Kate found a drawstring bag of fresh purple flowers, stems intact, sitting on top of a stack of dusty old books. They were pretty, and she decided to make a wreath like the ones the other girls had taught her to weave on the playground with buttercups and dandelions and blades of grass. When she was done, she placed the wreath on her head and skipped over to her father, who was adjusting the electrical gauges.

“Look, Daddy! I’m a princess!”

Her father looked down at her, panic flashing in his eyes before he scooped her up in his arms. “You, my dear, are a warrior queen,” he said. He plucked the flowers from her head, exhaling loudly. “But did you know this crown has magical powers?”

Kate stared, wide-eyed, as her father took her wreath and placed it down on the head of a she-wolf shackled to the basement’s brick wall. Instantly, the wolf started convulsing, its features shifting out of human form, and its eyes rolled back into its head as it rattled its chains. After a minute, Kate’s father removed the wreath from the she-wolf’s sweat-soaked blonde tangles and showed Kate the bright red blisters the flowers had seared across its forehead.

Kate giggled. “Only good little princesses can wear my crown!” she crowed. “Not nasty evil monsters!” Her father ruffled her hair and beamed down at her with pride while the she-wolf howled in pain.

~*~

One night, when Kate was seven, she woke up unexpectedly some time after midnight. Tossing and turning did no good, and she slipped out of bed and padded across the carpet, hoping a glass of water from the kitchen would help.

As she passed her father’s bedroom, she heard a strange sound, a strangled moan. Normally she would have kept walking, but the noise sounded like it might be a groan of pain, and Kate knew that monsters in the darkness were no fairy tale. She leaned on the door, cracking it open the tiniest bit to peek inside and make sure her father was ok.

Kate didn’t understand what she saw. There was a werewolf, yes – a dark-haired she-wolf she’d seen in the basement cage the day before. But it wasn’t attacking – it was tied to the bedposts with wolfsbane-threaded chains. Her father was holding the she-wolf down with his whole body, but he wasn’t lying still. His pants were around his ankles at the bottom of the bed, and the she-wolf was crying from yellow eyes. He was thrusting forward in an uneven rhythm, accompanied by the grunts and moans Kate had heard from outside.

“Daddy?” Kate said, voice scratchy. She really needed that glass of water.

Her father turned around, grabbing a sheet to cover himself as he climbed off the wolf. A wild look animated his face for a split second before it was replaced by the same calm intelligence she always saw in his eyes. “Katie. Go back to bed. We’ll talk in the morning.”

Kate knew better than to question her father, even when – especially when – nothing he did made any sense. She made a move to leave, water quest abandoned. But as she turned, she made accidental eye contact with the shaking, crying she-wolf. When the wolf looked at her, Kate expected to see fury – the same fury she always saw in their eyes, when she watched her father work. But this wolf looked almost… pitying. As if Kate were the one tied to bedposts with poison shackles.

Kate shook her head, closed the door behind her, and returned to her bed. She fell asleep in minutes, and didn’t dream.

The next morning, her father woke her up with a plate of whipped cream-covered waffles and a serious expression on his face. “Katie, what you saw last night – it’s a new method I’m using, to make them talk. The results are encouraging. But it’s still… an experiment.” Kate nodded. That wasn’t so strange. The location, maybe – she had never seen her father move the wolves to his bedroom before – but not the strategy. 

“So let’s just keep this between us, ok? Your brother doesn’t need to know until I’ve perfected it. It’ll be our little secret.”

Kate smiled around a mouthful of waffle, whipped cream dribbling down her chin. “Ok, daddy. I can keep a secret.”

~*~

On her ninth birthday, nearly five years to the day after she’d first heard the word “werewolf” delivered with deadly seriousness, Kate’s father gave her a gun.

It wasn’t the first weapon she’d ever trained on. She’d been practicing archery for two years already, taught with genuine enthusiasm by her brother. Chris had a pure love for the sport and endless patience for his little sister. He helped her improve her stance, the strength in her arms, the way she needed to look at a target to aim the arrow just so. But she didn’t take to it the way he had. She could hit the target well enough, most of the time, but she lacked the patience for something so precise. She didn’t want to learn an art. She wasn’t a graceful girl. She wanted to learn how to kill or maim a monster, quickly and efficiently, and move on to her next target. 

In a matter of weeks, Chris would be packing up his things and moving to California for college, thousands of miles from their current home in Pennsylvania. He’d already promised to continue Kate’s archery lessons when he was home on break, but in the meantime, Kate’s father didn’t want his daughter’s hunting skills to atrophy. And while his own preferred weapons were knives and swords, he had an inkling that his youngest child might prefer something a little more…explosive.

It was just a BB gun. Kate’s father presented it to her with an almost apologetic air. “The guns will grow more powerful as you do,” he said, placing it into her hands, “but you aren’t too young to start learning the basics.” Kate loved it instantly. The heft of it in her hands, the gleaming metallic finish, the way the trigger felt under the pad of her finger. She never wanted to let go.

Her father took her into the backyard and taught her how to load and unload the gun, how to aim and how to fire. Kate turned the gun on her archery target and fired methodically, loading one pellet after the other, filling the foam circle with BBs. More than half hit the bullseye.

For the first time in her life, Kate felt like a hunter.

~*~

The next summer, when Kate turned 10, her father took her on her first hunt. Chris had come home two months earlier with tan skin, pale hair, and a dusting of stubble on his chin, and he’d been hunting with their father all summer, traveling up and down the eastern seaboard on a mission to capture a couple of rogue betas from the Standish pack. They’d sent Kate to summer camp for most of July, where she’d spent every moment that didn’t involve sports or food feeling miserable and glaring at the other girls in her cabin, who only seemed to care about hair-braiding and arts and crafts. But now Kate was back home and itching for adventure, and her father agreed that her time had finally come.

The mission was a milk run: Kate’s father had gotten wind of a half-starved omega attacking an elderly man on the outskirts of the forest two towns away. No pack wanted to claim him, and his choice of targets was evidence enough that his powers were limited. Kate’s father planned to string him up as both a favor and a warning to the local packs. It was a two-man job at most, something Chris and their father could have taken care of in the space of an afternoon, but they invited a few other hunters along all the same, for extra assurance that Kate’s first experience in the field would go smoothly. There were three hunters in all – Joanne and Sara, representatives of the Silber and Platero hunting families, respectively, and an Argent foot soldier named Ben – and they smiled when Kate climbed into the truck. 

“I still remember my first hunt,” Joanne Silber said, reaching over to squeeze Kate’s hand. “I was about your age, too. I’m glad to see Gerard is bringing you up right.”

In the woman’s gray-streaked hair and the scars that laced the muscled contours of her arms, Kate saw a prophecy of her own future. She grinned. “You bet he is.”

But the moment they stepped out of the truck and onto the leaf-covered forest floor, Kate knew something was wrong. The omega bounded into view in seconds, snarling and flashing his electric blue eyes, but he held back, flitting between trees to dodge the hunters’ first few bullets. He didn’t look nearly as starved as the rumors had led them to believe, and before Sara Platero could get a third round off from her shotgun, three more wolves entered the clearing – big, strong wolves, two females and a male, with glistening fangs and well-groomed fur and, in the case of the biggest female, bright red eyes. The omega had found a pack.

Chris yelled at Kate to stay close to the truck as he loaded up his crossbow and sent the first wolfsbane-tipped arrow flying. Kate pressed her gun to her shoulder, wanting to do her part, but as she turned her head left and right she realized she had no idea where she would even begin. Stumbling back against the warm metal of the truck behind her, Kate watched as the scene exploded into chaos. Sara and Ben fired shot after shot as Chris fired arrow after arrow, and her father looked like a wild man as he charged the wolves with his sword, slashing at their skin with the wolfsbane-dipped blade. But Joanne was the most frenzied of all, barreling straight into the melee with her body and tackling the female beta with her bare hands. Kate watched as the beta’s claws scrabbled at Joanne’s arms, opening up the old scars, but Joanne’s fighting skills were unmatched; in the time it took the other three to take down the remaining wolves with their weapons, Joanne had already flipped the female beta onto its back and snapped its neck into the dirt.

Kate felt a wave of calm crash over her spiking adrenaline as she watched the adults crowding around the bodies of three wolves a dozen yards away, her father dismembering them one by one with his sword just to be sure. 

Then Kate counted the wolves again. One, two, three. Not four. On the ground lay the alpha and her two betas, but the omega was nowhere to be found.

Kate peered into the forest, trying to figure out which direction the omega had gone; their mission wouldn’t be over until they caught the wolf they’d come here to get in the first place. Nothing seemed amiss as far as her eyes could see. While the adults did their work, Kate tiptoed around the truck to check the area behind it. That’s when the omega attacked.

Kate was still holding her gun, but as fear seized her small body her arms froze stiff against her chest, and when the omega tackled Kate the gun dislodged from her grip and tumbled to the ground several feet away. Unable to move under the omega’s weight, Kate screamed as loud as she could: “DADDY!”

The hunters came running, but stopped abruptly at the sight of Kate and the omega entangled on the ground. From the corner of her eye, Kate could see terror twisting her brother’s face into a grotesque mask. Kate knew what the problem must be: the way they were positioned, there was no way for the hunters to shoot the monster without also hitting Kate. Kate could feel tears pricking her eyes as the wolf held her down, his stinking breath hot on her face, his claws poised above her throat. She’d never wanted her first hunt to be her last.

Then an awesome force came crashing into her, sending the omega hurtling off of her chest and across the forest floor. When Kate scrambled upright she saw that the force of nature was Joanne Silber, who had the wolf in a headlock and was attempting to push him facedown into the dirt.

“Run, Katie!” Joanne yelled, her intense blue eyes piercing through Kate’s fear. But in the split second her head was turned, the omega thrust its hand up and made one last, desperate swipe, tearing three deep gashes across Joanne’s throat.

“No!” Kate screamed, as she watched Joanne’s gray t-shirt darken with the gush of blood, watched her eyes roll back into her head. The omega looked up with a sinister curl of his lip, sizing Kate up once again now that her protector was vanquished, but Kate’s instincts finally took over. As the rest of the hunters sprang into action, Kate grabbed her fallen gun and fired the first bullet between the wolf’s eyes.

When Joanne and the omega both lay dead on the ground, Kate staggered backwards against the side of the truck, fell to her knees, and emptied the morning’s Lucky Charms onto the dirt. She stayed there, silent and shaking, bits of vomit clinging to the ends of her tangled hair, until her father’s shadow fell over her spot.

“Get up,” he said. Kate did as she was told, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. When she was standing, her father looked her in the eye with an expression that betrayed nothing and slapped her, hard, across the cheek.

“My daughter will not be weak,” he said. “I’ll forgive you this one instance. If I ever see you cry or hesitate again, you _will_ suffer the consequences.”

Her father walked away and Chris took his place, coming up to Kate and pressing her face into his chest. But Kate didn’t want his comfort, and she was glad when he didn’t try to say a word. Because her father was right. Joanne Silber was dead because of her weakness. This could never happen again.

Chris took Kate home while the other adults stayed behind to tie up the loose ends of the day’s events. Kate didn’t understand all the details of what they had to do, but she heard the conversation flying back and forth – phrases like “pay off the coroner” and “track down the new alpha,” commands from her father to “disguise the scents” and “notify the Silber liaison.” When they reached the house, Chris made Kate some soup, hugged her tight, and tucked her into bed before driving the truck back to the scene. Kate lay face up in her bed, soup untouched and brain running wild, until her father arrived hours later.

He came into her unlit room and approached her bed, but he must have seen the glint of her open eyes. “You’re awake.”

Kate sat up and looked at her father’s face. In the moonlight, she could see the way shadows fell along the growing wrinkles around his eyes. She’d always known her father was older than the fathers of most girls her age, but this was the first time she’d ever thought about what that meant. All the energy and focus he’d had during the hunt had faded into a pinched exhaustion.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He came over and sat on the edge of her bed. “Apologies are irrelevant. Do better next time,” he said. But his tone had lost its earlier sharpness, and he placed a palm to her forehead, smoothing back her hair.

“Dad,” Kate ventured, arms wrapped protectively across her chest. “Can I ask you something?”

Her father didn’t respond, so Kate pressed on, asking the question her mind had been tossing around for the better part of the evening. “What happened today. Is that how Mom died?”

They’d never discussed her mother before. It was Chris who had told her, when she was starting pre-school and realized that most of the other kids in her class had both a daddy and a mommy, that their mother had died soon after Kate was born. Kate had never asked for any details. Unlike her brother, who had been nearly ten when he’d lost her, Kate felt no longing for the presence of a woman she couldn’t remember. But this sudden realization, the clicking of pieces into place, was enough to make her reevaluate that missing connection.

Her father’s face didn’t lose any of its hardness, but he averted his eyes, looking somewhere over Kate’s right shoulder. “Yes,” he said.

Kate nodded. The haunted look she’d seen on Chris’s face had been confirmation in itself, but her father’s word sealed it.

“I won’t let that happen to me,” she promised.

Her father nodded, standing up from the bed. “Good.”

~*~

Kate kept training. Her thin arms grew muscular from the repetitive loading and unloading of guns and bows, and when she wasn’t practicing her physical skills she was studying, making her way through translated sections of her father’s bestiary at a slow but steady pace. Her reading skills were strong for someone her age, but she hadn’t yet learned archaic Latin. Her father had promised to begin her language lessons when she turned thirteen. 

The next year, when Kate was eleven, the Argents moved to a small town in Texas where Kate began middle school. Three months into the school year, her dad came home from parent-teacher conferences and appeared in her doorway with a stern look. Kate sat at the desk in her room, making her way through her math homework, and met her father’s eyes with surprise. Her grades were perfect. What could he possibly be angry about?

Her father walked into the room and stood over her chair, peering down. Kate had grown three inches in the past year, a growth spurt not unrelated to the tiny buds blooming on her chest, and her father had stopped sitting down when he spoke to her, their level eye contact unnerving for the both of them.

“I had an interesting discussion with Mrs. Watson this evening,” he said. “She expressed some… concern.”

Kate frowned. Mrs. Watson had always seemed to like her. “But I’ve never done anything bad in her class. I always do my homework, and—“

“It’s not your performance she’s worried about,” her father said, cutting her off. “It’s your social life. Or, rather, your lack thereof.”

Kate slumped back into her chair. “She’s mad that I don’t have _friends_?”

“It’s more than that, Kate, as I’m sure you know. She tells me you don’t talk to any of your fellow students. That you’ve taken to spending the entirety of lunch and recess with your head buried in a book.”

“Well of _course_ I do!” Kate exclaimed. She couldn’t believe they were even having this conversation. “The kids in my class don’t care about anything important. They don’t even know what goes on in their own backyards during the full moon! Why would I waste my time talking to them when I can be studying for the hunt?”

Gerard crossed his arms over his chest. “Katherine. What do I do when I’m not hunting?”

“You sell weapons to the cops.”

“And?”

Kate bit her lip. “You go to… to your book club. And you work in the garden.”

“And do you know _why_ I do that?”

Kate didn’t have an answer at hand. These were the things her father did, the rhythms of the life he’d made. She’d never had a reason to question them.

“I do those things so that I can appear, to the rest of the world, like an average middle-aged father with hobbies and a career. I do those things because it’s important that most of the fools in this country _don’t_ know what goes on in their own backyards. If everyone knew what we do, we’d have the government breathing down our necks, calling for regulations, mucking up the entire process. The wolves would run free _and_ we’d be out of a job.”

Kate’s father leaned forward, punctuating each word with a click of his teeth. “So. I. _Pretend_.”

Kate let her head droop forward and stared at her feet. “Oh.”

“I managed to convince Mrs. Watson that you’d simply had trouble making friends in a brand new town,” her father continued. “But when you return to school tomorrow, I want you to start socializing. Sit with other girls at lunch. Flirt with a popular boy. Join a game of kickball. Show the world that you are perfectly normal, so you can continue to be extraordinary.”

And with that, her father turned on his heel and exited the room, the “or else” left unspoken.

Kate let her pencil fall onto her desk. Pretend, she thought. She could pretend. She’d be the best damn pretender anyone had ever seen.

~*~

Chris stopped coming home for every break. Kate’s father always dismissed his absences – “Chris has business out west,” he’d say, or “Your brother is becoming his own man. I can’t begrudge him that.” But there was always a tone of sarcasm threaded with malice beneath his words, and Kate learned not to ask. She loved her brother and her father, and she wasn’t about to let herself come between them.

Kate thrived in middle school. Once she started pretending, she never stopped. Within a year, she’d gone from the lonely loser in the corner of the lunchroom to the queen bee, leader of a posse of the most popular girls in seventh grade. When a boy tried to trip her in the hallway one day, she spun around and flipped him flat on his back; she was suspended for three days, but no one at the school ever tried to mess with her again, and her father didn’t punish her. His belief that his daughter should lead others with a combination of intelligence and brute strength apparently trumped his desire for her to appear “normal” – as long as it didn’t happen again.

Her father took her on a few more hunts, hunts that went as planned. Kate killed two more werewolves before she graduated middle school, and she didn’t succumb to tears or vomit. She knew her path, and she walked it true.

The summer after seventh grade, Chris came home to celebrate Kate’s 13th birthday. He’d graduated college two months before, and Kate and her father had flown across the country to attend the ceremony, but they’d only stayed a few days, and Chris’s lease wouldn’t be up until the end of the summer. This visit was the first chance she’d gotten to see her big brother for more than two days since Christmas.

During the day, Kate and Chris went to the movies, played tennis in the park, and swam together in the backyard pool. Kate told him all about her school and her friends, about the cross country meet her track team had won and the basketball player in her Spanish class who’d asked her to dance at the semi-formal. Chris’s smile widened every time she gushed about anything mundane, and Kate decided not to tell him the details of her hunting, no matter how much she wanted his praise. Sometimes even family required pretending.

At night, Chris went hunting with their father, coming home in the wee hours smelling of dirt and gun oil as he leaned in to kiss Kate’s forehead. The Texan packs were always easier to fight in the dark, but they made chaos of sleep schedules.

The night before her birthday, Kate woke up to the sounds of her father and brother arguing in the kitchen. Her brother’s voice was louder than she’d ever heard it.

“We stick to the damn _code_ , Gerard. We always have, and we always will. That pack has done _nothing_ to warrant an attack.”

“Oh, you and your precious _code_. You saw what good that code did your mother!”

Kate heard a crash, like Chris had thrown something across the kitchen. “My mother died because of _your_ recklessness, and you’re going to get Katie killed the same way!”

Kate tried to block out the argument. She had no way of knowing who was right and who was wrong, and trying to parse the two sides was liable to reduce her to tears of frustration. But the noise was far too loud to ignore.

“Your sister is already twice the hunter you are,” her father snarled. “And when she comes of age, I’ll be happy to follow her lead. But right now, I’m in charge of this family, and as long as you expect support from me, you will show me the proper respect.”

“Thanks for making this easier, then, _Dad_. I’ll be out of here before the sun rises. But if I hear about anything happening to that pack, I’ll report you to the other families so fast your head will spin.”

Her father laughed an ugly laugh. “If you had the guts to do something like that, you wouldn’t be the disappointment you are.”

Kate didn’t hear Chris respond. Instead, she heard footsteps on the staircase, and moments later the creaking of hinges as Chris entered her room.

Kate sat up, giving up any pretense of being asleep. “Are you really leaving?”

Chris sat on the edge of the bed and smoothed back her hair. “I’m sorry, Katie. I have to. But I’ll call you, I promise. And when I’m settled into my new apartment, I’ll give you my address so you can visit me when you’re old enough.”

Kate hugged her knees to her chest. “Why don’t you just listen to dad? Why is the code so important? Why _shouldn’t_ we kill all the monsters?”

Chris’s hand stilled atop her head and he turned on her bedside lamp, revealing his serious blue eyes.

“What do you think about spiders?” he asked.

Kate wasn’t sure where this conversation was going, but she made a face of appropriate disgust. “They’re gross.”

Chris nodded. “I think so, too. I really hate spiders. And when I see a spider in the house? I kill it right away, no question. If I ever saw a spider coming toward a person, ready to bite them, I’d have a paper towel ready to smash them before you could blink.”

Kate nodded. “Of course.” She still remembered Chris killing a spider she’d found climbing her bedroom wall when she was five. She’d already gotten used to werewolves, back then, but a penny-sized arachnid had made her shriek.

“But there are spiders all over the place,” Chris continued, “and most of them are just living out in nature, minding their own business, only eating other nasty bugs. It doesn’t mean I like those spiders – I don’t want to be anywhere near them. But I’m not going to go out with bug spray and try to kill all the spiders in the forest, because then I’d just be a bully – and, worse, I’d be disrupting the balance of the local ecosystem.”

Chris looked down with sad eyes rimmed with red from lack of sleep. “Do you understand?”

Kate nodded. She wanted to argue. She wanted to ask, _but what if the spiders you don’t kill in the forest find you in your house when they’re bigger and stronger? What if not killing them now means they’ll be able to bite you later?_ But her big brother was sitting on the side of her bed for maybe the last time, and she didn’t want to ruin the moment with a fight.

“Where will you go?” she asked instead.

“Back to California. There’s a girl there. Her name is Victoria, and she’s from a hunting family.” He smiled. “I think I’m going to ask her to marry me.”

Kate grabbed her brother’s hand in both of her own. “Good. You better invite me to the wedding.”

“Of course I will, Katie-Kate.” Chris stood up and kissed her on top of her head. “Now get some sleep. I’ll call you soon.”

~*~

Chris did invite Kate to the wedding, but Kate didn’t go. After Chris called to tell her about the engagement, Kate started to prepare a speech for her father, listing all the reasons it was important for her to attend the wedding, as a representative of the Argent family. But when the invitation finally arrived, Kate didn’t get past the first sentence of the card before dropping it like a short match:

_You are cordially invited to the celebrate the wedding of Victoria Silber and Christopher Argent._

Victoria _Silber_. Kate picked up the card again and studied the picture on the front, of her brother with his arms around his redheaded soon-to-be bride. Even crinkled up in a smile, Kate recognized the intense blue eyes she’d last seen three years earlier, rolling back into the head of her savior. _Joanne’s daughter._.

Kate circled the cursive “no” on the invitation, grabbed a stamp off the cork board in the kitchen, and shoved the invite into the return envelope before she could think twice. Then she grabbed a gun and went out on patrol by herself, deep in the woods. She didn’t encounter any werewolves, but she did kill three squirrels and a coyote. With each shot, she imagined herself at 10 again, doing what she’d been too young and too scared to do back then, succeeding at preventing the worst from happening. She imagined Joanne Silber crying at her daughter’s wedding, tears hitting her blouse where Kate had seen blood. She didn’t let herself cry tears of her own.

When she got home, her father was standing in the kitchen with the envelope in his hands. “Is there something you’d like to tell me?” he asked.

“I’m not going,” Kate said.

“Good girl,” her father said.

~*~

She was 14 when her father left her alone for a week with a prisoner. Normally they’d kill any caged wolves before heading off on a hunt they thought might take more than a day, but this one was a new capture, and they hadn’t managed to torture information out of him yet. Killing him would be a waste of resources.

“Get him to talk,” her father had said, as he donned his coat and cap and stepped out the front door. “That’s your mission.”

The wolf was young, within a year of Kate’s age. As she descended the creaking staircase he cowered in the back of the cage, but when Kate came into view he crawled forward, approaching the front wall of thick metal mesh.

“Where’s the old man?” he asked. This cage wasn’t electrified, just reinforced, and the boy-wolf, though trapped, wasn’t in pain. Without his features shifted to wolf, he looked just like the boys in Kate’s freshman English class.

Kate smiled, willing to give honey a shot before she brought out the vinegar. “He’s busy. He told me I could come say hi.”

The boy raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You’re not here to hurt me?”

Kate cocked her head to the side and started to twirl her hair around her finger. “Are you going to hurt me?”

The boy gestured around the cage. “I don’t think I could if I wanted to.”

“Then that’s settled.” Kate sat down on the cement floor next to the cage after making sure a cattle prod was within arm’s reach. 

“Do you go to Centennial?” she asked, putting on a polite smile tinged with flirtation. “I don’t recognize you, and I’m pretty sure I’d remember cheekbones like those.”

The boy smiled bashfully, and Kate knew she’d hooked him. “No, I’m, um, homeschooled.”

“Oh, cool.” Kate said. “My dad homeschools me sometimes, when we’re on the road. Mostly he just makes me read Shakespeare over and over, though.” She rolled her eyes, a calculated gesture of solidarity. “I hope your parents are better teachers than he is.”

“My mom used to be a teacher before she met my dad, so she’s really good at it,” the boy replied. “My brothers and I are kind of terrible students, though. We drive her up a wall.”

“How many brothers do you have?”

“Two. Ten-year-old twins.”

Kate couldn’t believe just how much this boy was giving her. Already she was making a list of records she could search to track down the rest of the pack – school employment histories, home school registrations, birth certificates for area twins circa 1984. A homeschooled wolf kept isolated from the outside world – this kid was the easiest kind of mark.

“Do you want a snack or something? Maybe some music?” Kate asked.

The boy’s skepticism returned abruptly, and he drew back in his cage. “Why are you being nice to me?”

“Because I’m a nice person.” Kate gave the boy her most convincingly sincere smile. “Give me a few minutes and I’ll scrounge up some chips.”

“No thank you,” the boy said, drawing his knees up to his chest.

Kate shrugged. “’Kay,” she said, and went back upstairs to finish her homework.

It went on like that for the next two days. Kate would go downstairs every day after school and they’d start talking, get more and more comfortable with each other. Then something would set the boy off and he’d curl up again, crossing his arms, abruptly aware of the cage he was in. Kate hadn’t gained any relevant information since the first day. It wasn’t yet time to bring out the vinegar, but she definitely had to change tactics.

When she entered the basement the next afternoon, holding aloft a plate of cookies in one hand, she took out a key and locked the door behind her. Then she descended the staircase and stood in front of the boy’s cage.

“I brought a deck of cards,” she said, as the boy eyed the cookies hungrily.

The boy raised an eyebrow. “What, are we gonna play through the food grate?” he asked, gesturing at the latch near the floor. The holes in the fine metal mesh of the rest of the cage were far too small for cards to pass through.

“Nope,” Kate said. She held up a key, different from the one she’d used to lock the basement. “We’ll sit at the table over there.”

The boy looked at her in disbelief as she unlocked the cage and gestured for him to climb out. Though he remained unshifted, he looked more like a dog than ever as he crawled forward, turning his head right and left in anticipation of punishment.

Kate walked to the basement table and set down the tray of cookies. “Come on,” she said. “There’s milk in the fridge.”

Kate had a wolfsbane-laced knife in her boot and the key to the heavy-duty basement lock tucked away in her bra, and she was pretty sure she could take out the boy in seconds if he tried anything. But he didn’t. He just poured himself a glass of milk and sat down at the table like she’d asked, then shoved a cookie in his mouth.

She dealt out two hands of cards and waited for him to finish his first cookie. “Do you have any sevens?” she asked.

The boy shook his head. “Go fish,” he said. Kate grinned and took a card from the deck.

She still locked the boy up when she was out of the house or sleeping, but during the afternoon and evening she let him walk around the basement freely. He started to give up more useful information – the kinds of plants his mother grew in their garden, the first names of the uncles and aunts and cousins who lived with him. Kate added to her hunting notebook every time she went back upstairs, drawing a more complete picture of the pack they were hunting and the places they might live. And still the boy didn’t make a move to escape.

On the fifth day of Kate’s father’s trip, Kate and the boy were watching sitcoms on the basement’s portable TV when the boy cocked his head at her and asked, sincerely, “Why do you hate us so much?”

Kate pursed her lips together. It wasn’t that she didn’t have an answer; the answer just seemed incredibly obvious -- too obvious to articulate. “Well, because you’re murderers,” she said, finally.

The boy let out a sharp laugh. “I’ve never killed anyone. I bet you can’t say the same.”

“I’ve never killed a human being,” Kate retorted. She tried not to think about Joanne Silber. “And you will, someday. That’s what monsters do.” She looked at him almost pityingly and shrugged. “It’s just the way things are. There are heroes, and there are villains. We do what we have to do.”

The boy shook his head. “I’m sure that’s what your dad says,” he said. “But you said it yourself – you’re nice. You don’t have to be like him.”

“No, I don’t,” Kate said. “But what if I want to be?”

The boy shook his head again and turned away. “Did you mean what you said, that first day? About my cheekbones?”

Kate looked at the boy again, taking in his profile as he continued to look away from her. “Sure,” she said. There was no harm in admitting that, even if she did make her blush against her will.

“I think you’re pretty, too,” the boy said. He turned back to look at her.

Kate drew in a breath and told herself that the boy was a monster. Then she remembered a night long ago, when she’d walked in on her father and the she-wolf. If her father could do that…

“Come here,” she said. She reached across the table and grabbed his wrist. He was stronger than she was by a large margin, but she knew where the power really lay. He leaned in obediently, and she grabbed the back of his neck with her other hand, pulling him in for a kiss. Their mouths met, and Kate felt the exhilaration of the forbidden coursing through her veins. She imagined biting down on his tongue, spilling blood from a wound that would instantly heal, but she settled for the bitter clash of lips and teeth.

When she finally released him, the boy pulled away and sat back in his chair. “You won’t kill me, will you?” he asked, his voice small. Kate didn’t answer.

“What’s your name?” she asked, instead. It was the one piece of information she hadn’t bothered to get, something her father surely already knew, but didn’t care much about.

“Jeremy,” he said.

Kate’s father came home on Saturday. He asked her how the interrogation had gone, and she showed him her notebook full of data. He skimmed the contents, then closed the book and nodded. “Perfect. We can dispose of him now.”

Kate opened her mouth to speak, to protest. Maybe they could make one exception. But this exception already knew too much. It didn’t matter that this boy laughed uproariously at _Seinfeld_ and _Friends_ , that he always won at Go Fish. It didn’t matter that she knew his name was Jeremy. He knew her name was Kate, and that was the bigger problem.

“Ok,” Kate said, ignoring the phantom taste of blood on her tongue. She grabbed a shovel and slipped out the back door, ready to dig up a boy-sized patch of her father’s garden and bury her empathy once and for all.

~*~

Kate lost her virginity in an unremarkable way. She was 16, her family had been living in Colorado for almost a year, and her boyfriend, Sean, took her to prom. She felt much more vulnerable at the dance itself, wearing a floor-length dress with no gun strapped to her leg, than she did when she stood naked in front of him in a hotel room later that night. She knew how to fight in a hotel room, if it came down to that; more than once she and her father had lured a wolf back to her their room while hunting on the road, taking advantage of the motel’s anonymity to spring their trap. But Sean was polite and respectful, a perfect gentleman. When Kate climbed on top of him, he didn’t protest, and ten minutes later the deed was done.

Kate lay quietly in the bed when it was over, feeling dissatisfied in a way she couldn’t explain. Sean fell asleep soon after, and she watched his sleeping form, thinking about how easy it would be to put a bullet in his brain, to break every one of his fragile bones, to slice him in half with her father’s sword. She wouldn’t, of course. Sean was harmless. Harmless and disappointingly _human_.

Her father called her on the motel room phone later that night. He needed help on a mission. The noise of the ringing phone roused Sean, but Kate soothed him back to sleep with a soft stroke of her hand through his hair and pulled on the hunting clothes she’d packed. Outside, Kate’s father sat in his idling truck and handed Kate her gun when she climbed in on the other side. The cold metal of the weapon felt far better under her hands than Sean’s warm skin.

“How was prom, darling?” her father asked.

“Boring,” Kate replied.

Her father offered a knowing smile and shifted the truck into gear.

Sixteen was the age of adulthood, as far as the hunting community was concerned. Kate remembered how her brother had spent more and more time on missions when he hit his junior year of high school, drinking several cups of coffee at the breakfast table to stay awake at school after a long night of hunting. She’d been thinking about him more and more since she’d come of age, comparing her experiences to those he must have had, but the reminiscing wasn’t enough to make her contact him. The last thing she wanted to do was upset her father. If he compared her to Chris, Kate always won out, and she didn’t have any interest in changing that.

That winter, over her holiday break, Kate and her father took a trip up to Wisconsin to track a pack that had recently relocated, breaking several agreements with local hunters. The northern Wisconsin forest was already frosted over from an early-season snowstorm, and Kate stamped her boots impatiently into the ground, willing herself to feel warm, resentful of the gloves separating her flesh from the trigger of her gun. When they encountered the pack, though, Kate’s blood rushed through her veins with a warmth to rival the most sweltering August heat wave.

Kate threw back her head and laughed as a wolf tripped and fell in front of her, bleeding from its shoulder. She loved it when they tried to run. She stood over the prone body and cocked her gun. “Say goodbye, you son of a bitch,” she said, taking the easy headshot. It would have been more fun to toy with the creature, but wolfsbane bullets weren’t cheap.

The last she-wolf wasn’t part of the pack they’d been hunting. She was a visitor, the alpha of a different pack entirely, there on diplomatic business. Kate didn’t much care. Bagging an alpha was something she hadn’t yet managed, and when the new wolf appeared in a clearing on the way back to their truck, Kate took a shot before her father could say a word. It hit her squarely in the chest, inches to the right of her heart.

Her father held up a hand. “Katherine,” he said, voice steely. “That’s quite enough. We don’t want to be in the vicinity should the authorities arrive.”

“But—” Kate began.

“That’s the Hale alpha,” her father continued, his measured voice plowing over her objection. “You’ve wounded her grievously; she likely won’t survive another hour. Your work is done.”

Kate holstered her gun and glared at her father. “When do I get to start giving the orders?” she asked, hating the way her voice turned into a whine. “I’m seventeen already. Shouldn’t I be the leader you raised me to be?”

Her father spread his hands before him in a placating gesture. “I only mean to give you advice and guidance. As a father. This above all: to thine own self be true. I will, of course, stand aside if you make another choice.” His tone and the look in his eyes, not to mention the Shakespeare, implied those “choices” were limited, but Kate’s adrenaline was already running out and she didn’t have the energy to fight.

“Fine,” she said, and followed her own footprints out of the woods, leaving the Hale alpha to bleed into the snow.

~*~

Kate was a month away from graduating high school in a small town in the middle of Michigan when her brother paged her. Kate pulled the pager off the waistband of her jeans and frowned at the unfamiliar number. She was at school and shouldn’t have had a pager at all, but Kate had never worried much about following the rules. When the hallways cleared, she slipped out a side door and walked down the road to the closest gas station to call the number on a payphone.

“Katie,” Chris said, using a nickname Kate hadn’t been called in years. It was the first time she’d heard his voice since he’d run away four years before – he’d managed to track down their address, from time to time, but Kate’s father had always kept their phone numbers close to the vest.

Kate was surprised by how much emotion leaked into her voice. “Chris? How did you get my number?”

“Ran into a member of the Platero clan on a hunt. He said he’d been working with you.”

“You’re hunting again?” Kate asked, surprised.

“I never stopped. I don’t need Gerard’s approval to do the work that needs doing.” He paused. “And neither do you. You’ll be 18 this summer.”

Kate sighed and let the pause end that line of discussion. She still had no interest in coming between her father and her brother. Even if her father still hadn’t let her lead a hunt. “I’m supposed to be in school, you know,” she said instead.

“I know. That’s the only way I could guarantee Gerard wouldn’t stop you from calling me back. You can afford to miss a few classes, genius that you are.”

Kate laughed. “Yeah, I think I’ll live. Man, you’d hate it here. Archery’s actually illegal, can you believe that? Town ordinance.”

“Good thing I went away, then.” Kate could hear his smile through the phone line. Then Chris cleared this throat. “Listen, Kate… you have a niece. Her name is Allison. She’s three years old, and… I want her to know her aunt.”

Kate gripped the ledge of the payphone’s box, her thumb brushing against the phone book underneath. “But your wife…”

“Victoria wants to meet you, too.”

“She wouldn’t if she knew what I did,” Kate said, her voice falling to a whisper.

“But she _does_ know,” Chris said. “She’s known since we were dating. She doesn’t blame you, Katie, and you shouldn’t blame yourself. You were a _child_. You shouldn’t have been out there to begin with. Victoria and I agree on that. We don’t plan to tell Allison until she’s an adult.”

Kate felt her breath catch in her throat. She tried to imagine living the last thirteen years of her life in ignorance, moving across the country for reasons no one would explain, staying stupid and soft while her family protected her from the evil lurking just outside the door. It would have been stupendously awful, and chillingly dangerous. 

Sooner or later, someone was going to have to tell that little girl the truth, for the sake of her own safety. Kate hadn’t been able to protect Joanne Silber, but she could sure as hell protect her granddaughter.

“Ok. Give me your address,” Kate said. “I’ll come visit.”

~*~

When Kate finally met Victoria Argent, nee Silber, it went better than she could have expected. The woman didn’t try to drown her in saccharine hospitality, but she wasn’t cold, either. She shook Kate’s hand firmly and took her measure with Joanne Silber’s icy eyes. “Chris has told me plenty about you, but so have the Plateros. Your reputation precedes you. It would be an honor to hunt with you.” Kate felt an eight-year-old weight lift from her chest as she released Victoria’s hand. They were both hunters, and they followed their codes. Before they’d even met, Victoria had acknowledged the reality that Kate had been so hesitant to accept: that she’d long ago paid off the debt of her childhood sin with gallons of werewolf blood.

Allison was a joy. At nearly four, she was verbal and animated, and she took to her Aunt Kate instantly. Kate brought her to Toys ‘R’ Us and let her pick out anything she wanted, didn’t even cringe when the price of the child-sized practice bow and arrow cleared out a big chunk of her high school graduation money. Kate started to fantasize about the future, when she could teach Allison all about her family’s legacy and the destiny it foretold. Kate saw herself in Allison, and she also saw Chris. But mostly, Kate saw Allison, a new human being full of promise. Her niece’s big brown eyes didn’t remind Kate of anyone else, and that was how it should be.

Chris took Kate on patrol with him. They didn’t speak on the drive out to the woods where the wolves were known to roam, the years of their separation weighing heavily between them. But when they parked, Chris turned to Kate before unbuckling his seatbelt.

“I’m glad you came,” he said, solemnly. “You’re so grown up now.”

Kate grinned and punched him in the arm. “You’re not gonna get all sappy on me, are you, big brother?” But she knew her eyes betrayed her sincerity.

Chris smiled back and opened his door, gesturing for Kate to follow. And just like that, everything was ok. They spent the whole night combing the woods, discussing tactics and trading ever-more-outlandish hunting stories like old fishermen on the docks. Unlike Gerard, Chris seemed to actually mean it when he said she was grown up. Gone was his hesitation to discuss hunting with her; gone was his disapproval of her participation. For the first time in their lives, Chris and Kate were equals, and Kate felt a rush of pride at the realization.

Kate’s trigger finger itched to take out a monster that night, but she respected Chris’s territory and his bizarre fixation on an outdated code. She could always come back for the area’s wolves if matters got out of hand.

While Kate was packing her things to leave – she had a summer job lined up back in Michigan that she had to get back to, a stopgap before she and her father figured out where they’d settle next – Chris walked into the room.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” Kate responded, shoving a rolled-up ball of tank tops into her suitcase. “You’re not going to beg me to stay, are you?”

Chris shook his head. “No. I just want to make sure you’re going to keep in touch.”

Kate stopped folding a pair of jeans and looked up. “I will. But it would be a lot easier to do that if you and Dad were speaking to each other.”

Chris sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. “You know Gerard and I don’t see eye to eye.”

“He’s still your father.”

Chris sat down on the edge of her bed. Kate remained standing, and she stared down at the top of her big brother’s head, marveling at the reversal.

“If it means that much to you, I’ll try to talk to him,” Chris relented. “But if I’m going to try to look at him more even-handedly, so should you. You’re old enough to make your own decisions now. Promise me you won’t do what he says unquestioningly.”

Kate saw the pleading in her brother’s eyes. She didn’t want to admit that she’d already been thinking the same thing, however tentatively. “Ok,” she said simply. “Deal. Now help me fold this stuff.”

~*~

Kate was 20 years old the first time she fucked a werewolf, but when it finally happened, she wondered why it had taken her so long.

She and Gerard – she’d taken to calling him Gerard, now, especially on missions, to make it clear that she wasn’t some kid tagging along while her father worked – had just reached the town in Louisiana where an inter-pack war was rumored to be brewing. Usually they steered clear of wolf-on-wolf clashes, since it meant the monsters were taking care of their jobs for them. But these wolves lived a little too close to civilization, not out in the woods like most packs, and it was Kate and Gerard’s responsibility to make sure no humans got caught in the crossfire. While Gerard unpacked, Kate headed off to the grocery store to stock up their new refrigerator. That was where she found Kyle.

Kate had done her homework; she knew every member of the Crawford and Collier packs by name and by face, from the surveillance photos the hunting community passed around. But she knew Kyle Crawford better than all of them. He was sixteen and a bit of a nerd, and most importantly, he had an Open Diary, free to be read by anyone on the internet, where he talked about his daily life in intimate detail – leaving out the werewolf-specific parts, of course. Kate had practically memorized it.

It was embarrassingly easy to snare him. All she had to do was drop a carton of eggs. He didn’t even try to hide his enhanced reflexes, just threw an arm out to grab the carton before it hit the floor. Kate smiled when he handed her the eggs. She called him her hero. She gave him her number. A few days later, they were rolling around in the backseat of her car.

She hadn’t told him her age, but she wasn’t sure it mattered – to him, or to her. What did age of consent matter when the consenter in question wasn’t even human? She let her hands and mouth roam down his werewolf-made rock-hard abs and laughed, suckling the warm flesh. When she put her head on his chest, she could hear the pumping of his heart, sending out a rush of hot blood with every beat, and she grinned as she imagined that blood spilling out onto her hands. But there was a thrill, too, in knowing what he could do – or try to do – if he knew who she was. The trick of it all, and the source of the thrill, was making sure the blood spilled wasn’t her own.

Gerard knew what she was doing. They didn’t talk about it, didn’t mention the specifics, but when he told her to continue getting close to the Crawford boy by any means necessary, she knew she had his tacit approval.

They were talking about _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ , of all things – Kate hated it, but she feigned interest in all of Kyle’s hobbies to keep him ensnared – when she decided to play the knowledge card. They were in her apartment, her father was away, and she knew she wouldn’t get a better chance.

“It must be weird to watch a show with a werewolf, knowing how wrong they get it.”

Kyle pulled away from her instantly and scooted back to the edge of the bed. “What, um. What do you mean?”

Kate smiled. “I knew the first day. No one’s reflexes are that good. And you never get any cuts or bruises… I bet you were already trying to think up excuses to be ‘busy’ during the next full moon, right?”

Kyle’s eyes were wide with alarm, but he only gaped at her like a suffocating fish, lips forming inaudible words.

“Hey, hey,” Kate said, grabbing his hands. “It’s ok. I had werewolf friends in my old town. I’m not gonna judge you.”

Kyle continued to stare at her. “You mean that? Seriously?”

“Of course,” she said. She pulled her body closer to his, hovering over him, both of them inches away from falling off the bed entirely. “Can you show me?” she whispered.

Kyle swallowed heavily and closed his eyes. Then his features began to shift, hair patterns migrating, brow and ears extending. When he opened his eyes to look at her, they were bright yellow.

Kate leaned in and kissed him, letting her tongue run over the sharp points of his new fangs. She pushed her tongue against them more insistently, increasing the pressure until the fangs nearly broke through her flesh. Her heart thrummed with a sense of danger.

“You’re perfect,” she said, raking sharp fingernails down his chest and watching the tiny white pieces of torn skin heal before her eyes. Images of all the things they could try flashed through her mind. Whips. Chains. Electricity. Fire.

The next time she saw him, she brought matches.

When it ended a month later, she didn’t let her father do her dirty work. She’d made a vow not to do that ever again, after Jeremy. Instead, it was Kate who took Kyle out to the woods, who lay down with him and watched his eyes blow wide when she slipped the dissolving mountain ash capsule into this mouth with her tongue. It was Kate who grabbed her paralyzed lover’s hand and used his own claws to open his throat, finally spilling the blood she’d been thirsting for. Then, from her pocket, she dropped the hairs she’d snatched from Rita Collier’s hairbrush in the ladies’ room of a restaurant the week before.

The pack war would continue, but Kate and Gerard could move on to the next mission. Kate couldn’t wait to use her new strategies again.

~*~

When Kate was 23, her father came home after a week on a hunt in Beacon Hills, California. Kate had been hunting on her own on the opposite side of the country, picking off the feral lupine residents of an abandoned mine in West Virginia, and since the Beacon Hills hunt was in California, Chris had joined Gerard for that mission. It was the first time Chris and Gerard had worked together since the formation of their tentative truce – though Chris still wasn’t allowing Gerard near Allison. Kate didn’t really understand it. Gerard had raised her just fine.

But Gerard came home with mixed news. The mission had been a success, but one wolf still eluded him: Talia Hale, alpha and matriarch of the Hale Pack. The woman who should have died years earlier, in a snow-covered stretch of barren Wisconsin forest. How she’d managed to stagger out of the woods with the wounds Kate had left was a mystery, but that didn’t matter. Kate should have finished the job when she’d had the chance, and now the Hale alpha had escaped a second time.

Beacon Hills was Talia’s territory, and in her home, surrounded by her pack, she was as secure as any werewolf ever got. Going after her directly would be impossible, without drawing unwanted attention. But Kate had never liked loose ends. “I’ll track down the outliers of her pack,” Kate promised her father. “They’ll have the information we need. She won’t escape a third time.”

It took Kate the better part of two years to track down a Hale sub-pack with a small territory in the Midwest. They were an old, strong family, with a complex network of ties that allowed them to establish well-hidden satellite packs across the country, but this sub-pack had made the fatal mistake of establishing a treaty with much weaker pack neighbors – neighbors who were more than willing to trade information for their lives. Not that Kate had left them with those, when the negotiations were done.

Kate and Gerard parked their car at the edge of a wildlife preserve in the middle of Kansas and pulled out their weapons. It was late autumn, and their boots crunched over the sea of shriveled brown leaves that littered the forest floor. The forest was otherwise silent, right up until the moment a small wooden house came into view and the faint sound of music filtered through the walls.

They knocked. Kate wanted to giggle at the absurdity. The Big Bad Wolf was inside the house of sticks, and the little pigs were giving him the courtesy of a knock before they started huffing and puffing. 

Then a woman pulled open the door, claws extended. She was tall and probably older than she looked; the white in her blonde hair was a better indication of her age than the wolf-granted strength in her muscles. Kate aimed a gun at her chest, but the woman’s attention was drawn to Kate’s father. “Gerard? Why did you come here? I thought we agreed…”

Kate stole a glance at her father. His face was expressionless, but his gun wasn’t raised. His features were still, his eyes glassy. Kate turned back to the woman, raising her gun higher. Her instincts told her the playing field had just shifted, but she didn’t yet know why.

“We’re gonna be the ones asking the questions, wolf bitch,” Kate said. “If you know my father, you know how dangerous he is, and you’ll do what we ask.”

“Your father…” the woman whispered, with wonder, and her voice broke. “Katie? Is it really you?”

Kate took a step back, though she kept her gun steady. She looked at the woman’s face again. She hadn’t recognized it immediately – why would she, when Gerard kept all the photo albums locked away? But Chris had kept some of his own, and he’d showed her once, years ago. Pictures of herself as an infant, sitting on the lap of a tall woman with blonde hair and a dazzling smile. This was the woman, she now realized, from whom Allison had inherited those big brown eyes.

Kate whirled on her father. “You lied to me.” She shook her head. “This is why you still haven’t killed Talia Hale, isn’t it? Because she’s my _mother’s alpha_?”

“Kate,” her father said warningly. “We’ll discuss this later. We have business to conduct.”

Kate could feel rage bubbling up within her, turning her stomach into a cauldron of acid. “No! You’re the one who didn’t conduct your _business_ when you should have.” She gestured at the woman in front of her, the woman she couldn’t bring herself to look at directly. “You said she was dead, and I believed you, because if _this_ was what had happened, you would have known what to do about it. You always do what needs to be done.”

“Sometimes exceptions have to be made!” her father roared. “I made the best decision I could at the time.”

“No,” Kate said. “You made the weak decision.” She spit at her father’s feet, then watched the saliva drip from his shoes to the disintegrating leaves beneath. She could hardly believe this was the man she’d followed blindly for so long.

“Katie, please. This is a blessing!” The woman was talking, now, pleading, and her voice seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, a cyclone of noise circling Kate’s head. “Come inside, let me get to know you. You’ve become such a lovely young woman…”

Kate looked the woman in the eye. “Lovely isn’t the word,” she said, and fired two wolfsbane bullets into her mother’s forehead.

~*~

Kate didn’t say a word to her father. She took off through the woods, leaving him to deal with the body. When she got back to the car, she hopped inside and started driving, blowing past the speed limit until she was back on the interstate. Gerard could call himself a cab. 

At the California state line, Kate called her brother and left a message on his answering machine. “Hey, Chris. I’m going to be in your neck of the woods for a little while. I thought I’d stop by and visit my favorite niece. Let me know what day’s best for you!”

She’d have a nice visit, Kate thought. They were, after all, the only family she had left. And then she’d head up to Beacon Hills with guns, rage, and a bucket of lighter fluid, find the Hale pack, and set every last werewolf on fire.


End file.
